Allan Folsom, Whose First Novel Sold for $2 Million, Dies at 72

Allan Folsom, a struggling screenwriter whose first novel, an intricate thriller called “The Day After Tomorrow,” was by some accounts the highest-priced fiction debut in publishing history when its rights sold for $2 million in 1993, died on May 16 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 72.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his wife, Karen, said.

After more than 30 years of trying, often unsuccessfully, to sell film and television scripts, Mr. Folsom wrote “The Day After Tomorrow” about an American doctor who becomes embroiled in a neo-Nazi cabal to resurrect Hitler.

Aaron Priest, Mr. Folsom’s literary agent, thought he could sell the rights to the book for $50,000 to $250,000. He presented the manuscript to seven publishing houses and within two days he was fielding calls from three of them. Little, Brown and Company and Warner Books soon bought the manuscript for a combined $2 million. At the time, an acceptable advance for a first-time novelist was $5,000 to $7,500.

“As best as we can tell,” Mr. Priest said in an article in The New York Times about the deal, “this is the highest sale of a first novel since Bantam Books paid more than a million for Sally Beauman’s ‘Destiny’ in 1985.”

After the international and movie rights were sold, Mr. Folsom had grossed nearly $5 million. Some reviewers, like the novelist Robert Ward, worried that the book might not live up to the publicity.

“It would take something twisted, wild, ambitious, unputdownable and outrageous simply to compete with his own hype,” Mr. Ward wrote in his review in The Los Angeles Times in 1994. But he added: “Let me put it this way: I started ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ yesterday at two in the afternoon, and finished reading it, my eyes bleeding, at 3 a.m.” The novel debuted at No. 3 on The New York Times’s best-seller list and stayed on the list for months. It was never made into a movie; an unrelated film with the same title came out in 2004.

Allan Reed Folsom was born on Dec. 9, 1941, in Orlando, Fla. He grew up in Newton, Mass., and graduated from Boston University in 1963.

He moved to California, where he worked as a film editor and cameraman and on documentaries and TV movies.

He married Karen Glick in 1979, whose work as a management consultant largely supported them for years. Besides her, he is survived by their daughter, Riley Folsom; and a sister, Catherine Bacon.